Kevin Anderson

As someone new to radio mods, this is intimidating! Should I even attempt a MARS mod on my first HF rig, or is this something to leave to professionals? I'm comfortable with basic electronics but have never opened up a modern transceiver before.

so ive had my general for about two years now and honestly been pretty happy with the privileges but lately ive been eyeing some of the extra class bands especially down at the bottom of 20m and 40m where all the serious DX seems to hang out. been looking at the question pool and some of the stuff in there is no joke, like the smith charts and the filter theory and all the impedance matching stuff. i passed my general without too much trouble but this feels like a different animal. did anyone else find the jump from general to extra really steep or is it more manageable than it looks on paper? i dont have an engineering background, mostly self taught from handbooks and youtube.

the power lead to battery is definitely the right call, just make sure you fuse it close to the battery end, like within a foot or so. i've seen people put the fuse right at the radio and that kind of defeats the purpose if something goes wrong in the run. on the antenna thing, i get the wife situation completely. i ran a lip mount on my jeep for about a year before i finally gave in and did the NMO. honestly the lip mount wasnt terrible for local stuff, getting into repeaters, that kind of thing. but you will notice a difference especially if you ever do any simplex or if the repeater is more than 20-30 miles out. the cable also tends to get pinched over time with lip mounts which is annoying. for the firewall, most trucks have a rubber grommet somewhere you can poke through without drilling anything, worth looking around with a flashlight before you assume you need to drill.

welcome to the rabbit hole ha. honestly 100w and a vertical is totally fine to get started, you wont be winning any plaques but youll make contacts and thats really the point your first time out. i did my first CQ WW with an end fed and a barefoot 100w rig and still managed a few hundred QSOs over the weekend. for logging definitely grab N1MM Logger Plus, its free and basically the standard for HF contesting. takes a little while to get set up but there are youtube videos that walk through it and the multiplier tracking is all automatic which makes life a lot easier. paper logging for something like CQ WW would drive you crazy, the dupe checking alone is worth it. as for SOTA and contests they are kind of separate worlds, SOTA activations dont really feed into the major HF contests directly but there are SOTA specific events and some people chase summits during things like ARRL November sweepstakes for the fun of it. if you want to ease into things maybe try the ARRL DX contest first, the exchange is simpler than CQ WW and there are slightly fewer moving parts. just get on and call people, dont worry about rate or score your first time, just learn the flow of it

ok so i passed my general a few weeks ago and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know there's a chart somewhere but every time i look at it i get confused because there's the FCC allocation and then theres also like a gentlemens agreement thing about where different modes go and they dont always line up like i know phone starts at 7.175 for general class but then i see people talking about the dx window and staying away from 7.200 to 7.300 because thats where foreign broadcasters bleed in or something? and then someone at my club told me not to transmit below 7.125 even though technically i think i can? im just not sure what's a legal limit and what's just a convention people follow also is the band edge thing a real concern like will i get in trouble for being too close to 7.175 or is that more of a just be careful situation

I've been practicing Morse code for a few months now using LCWO and can comfortably copy at 8-10 WPM. I'm hitting the dreaded plateau that everyone talks about and having trouble pushing past 12 WPM. That's why people experience a "plateau" at 10 wpm, and don't see any progress for weeks or months. Those who finally get over that "hump" and progress beyond 10 wpm do so because, through constant practice, they have begun to copy code by reflex instead of by thought. I know the goal is to eventually reach 20WPM for contest work and comfortable ragchewing. What techniques or practice routines did you use to break through this barrier? Did you stick with random groups or switch to plain text?